PREVIEW-Episode 84: Nietzsche’s “Gay Science”

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 84 is something like, what is wisdom? And we read selections from Friedrich Nietzsche's the Gay Science, published mostly in 1882, with the rest in 1887. You can join the discussion, get links to the book and lots of other information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:35 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:40 Mark: Should we do some ground rules?

0:42 Dylan: Sure, sure.

0:43 Mark: Ground rules for our discussion include, number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd understand me if you'd only read Capitalism is fine, now shut up by the man. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more amusing. So this whole book is divided into aphorisms, some of which are just a couple of sentences and some of which are pages long, and we read many, many of them amounting to about a third of the book, is that right?

1:20 Wes: Yep.

1:20 Mark: But there are way too many to list right here, so I would suggest that you just go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and look at the episode announcement if you really wish to read exactly what we read in preparation for this. We read all the famous parts. Right, Wes, you just took everything that was pulled into one of the Nietzsche compilations?

1:37 Wes: Yeah, I took it from multiple sources, from syllabi and anthologies, and I basically just took the maximal set, and they're divided.

1:45 Mark: It's divided into five books, which are not entirely. There are some thematic connections within a given book, at least. He sets it up so it sounds like there is, but often it sounds like that. These aphorisms to me, like blog posts, he might pursue common themes between some of them, or bring something up and then bring something different up and then come back to the first thing, sort of. However the mood struck him, definitely some sections of it, like book three, which starts out with the death of God, like it really pursues fairly rigorously, like one theme for a good half of the book.

And then book five, we should say, along with the preface, were added way after the fact. So this was considered the last of his early works, I guess, right before Thus Spake Zarathustra his more famous fake biblical work that's written in a much different pseudo fictional style, but this is straight up philosophy. But then after he published books one through four here, and then he published Zarathustra and he published Beyond Good and Evil, and then he for some reason said, oh, I'm going to put another edition of Gay Science out and tack on book five and the preface and some songs at the end.

So how do you want to start?

2:49 Wes: We could try and say what gay Science means. And I think ultimately the theme of the book is a call for this fusion between the instinctual parts of our nature, which is what the gay has to do with, and then the rational, which he associates with science. Some background to that. I'm going to just briefly mention the book that we didn't do on the podcast, which is the Birth of Tragedy, but it's kind of a commonly referenced Nietzsche distinction, and that's between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. So this call for effusion isn't new. Where the Apollonian represents of rationality and order and the Dionysian represents the instinctual and the irrational.

And so the Birth of Tragedy kind of bemoans the loss of that, celebrates the fusion of that at a certain stage of pre Socratic Greek tragedy, and then bemoans the loss of that fusion after Socrates and after a certain kind of turn to a more rational frame of mind. And then he criticizes that and that kind of carries on into modern European culture. And at the time he wrote Birth of Tragedy, he sort of thought that German music, Beethoven and Wagner were reintroducing the Dionysian in a good way. I think we'll see in the Gay Science. He's going to backtrack on that and say, you can actually go too far in the Dionysian direction.

I think he mentions Dionysius in the Gay Science, but he doesn't really mention the Apollonian. He's going to talk more about something which I think we can associate with the Apollonian, which are ascetic ideals and Christianity and nihilism and things like that. And we did do a podcast on the Genealogy of Morals where he outlined some of that. So I think it's very useful for listeners to go back to that before they listen to this, because in a way, the Gay Science elaborates on a lot of those themes, even though it

4:27 Mark: was written earlier, but not that far earlier. The revision was not that far earlier. It was the same year, actually.

4:32 Wes: Yeah, we get the kind of aphoristic. It's Almost like he's toying around with these ideas. And the Genealogy of Morals is one of the rare long form essay approaches that he does. So it's a more straightforward version of some of the things that we get hints at here.

4:46 Dylan: Like the Birth of Tragedy is.

4:48 Wes: Yeah, right.

4:49 Dylan: I think your summary about the Apollonian was good. And the word that comes to mind that might be more familiar in terms of the criticism that Nietzsche would have of being too Dionysian would be romantic, don't you think?

5:02 Wes: Yep.

5:03 Mark: Well, yeah, that's his new whipping boy. Dionysus is the Greek God of wine. And whereas in the Birth of Tragedy that's presented as, as you said, is the irrational, here he ends up by the end when he brings up the term again and it doesn't show up a lot in this text, the meaning has changed to something that is just overflowing with energy. It's not necessarily against reason, but it is against asceticism. It is against the despiser of life. I mean it comes to represent what he thinks virtue, insofar as he's going to use any term like that is. Is this Dionysian?

5:38 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, Living dangerously is out of Dionysus.

5:41 Wes: He mentions Romanticism actually in the first aphorism. But 370 is where he explicitly says, yes, I misunderstood Schopenhauer and German music is bringing back a fusion of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. And he says, I fail to see that the distinctive character is Romanticism, which is prompted by basically this feeling of impoverishment where he thinks you're on the right track when your art is motivated by an over fullness of life, which is one of the associations to the Dionysian affirmation and strength instead of reaction. So Romanticism is a kind of reaction.

Right. It's a reaction against rationality, but that reaction is still a kind of form of impoverishment. So it's tricky to get out of Nietzsche's maze, Right, because you might think, well, here's a critic of the Enlightenment, let's say, or here's a critic of rationality, but that's not the case. And that's the whole point of using a title like the Gay Science, where what he's calling for is fusion of both principles in the right proportion. He's not saying get rid of science and get rid of reason or the opposite.

6:44 Dylan: Yeah. That's why for me it makes sense that his hero is Socrates, even if he has tremendously complicated relationship with Socrates. Certainly like the Socrates of the Apology is The great inquirer, moved by his daemon, seems to me something close to what he's talking about.

7:02 Wes: Yeah, I think we should say when we say ascetic ideals, we're referring back to the genealogy of morals. And I think the best way to think about that is anything that involves, just take the term literally, self denial, where we basically deny ourselves a full expression of our instincts. So for Nietzsche, the most fundamental instinct is going to be the will to power. And the genealogy describes the rise of ascetic ideals as he gives that account of slave morality and he gives that account of bad conscience. But basically the gist of those is that there are political forces that lead to the rise of ascetic ideals because the strong or whoever has political power, basically once hierarchy enters society, then the weak are forced to curtail their instincts and then the whole rise of what Nietzsche and the genealogy calls slave morality is a matter of making a virtue of having to curtail one's instincts and saying, well, this is what everyone ought to do and if you don't do that, you're evil.

So that is the ascetic ideal against which Nietzsche will rail in the future. But we see him railing against that here as well.

8:09 Dylan: When I was reading it and I was paying attention to the time that it was published, I don't know why it hadn't really occurred to me before, but that this is during a Victorian era in Europe and I don't know enough about the history to know to what extent sort of Victorianism wheedled its way into German social activity and stuff, or this was something that went all across Europe kind of. I don't want to use puritanical, but just Victorian disposition towards morals and that there's some of that background that he's reacting against.

8:41 Mark: Well, yes, ultra formalism, being very formal, being very reverent, certainly all that is there. He does have a special place for British moralists, a special place in his hell of them being especially dry and tedious. But he talks about Kant as having much the same, at least a related sort of anti Dionysian spirit.

9:02 Dylan: Yeah, well, especially in his moral theory. Right. You know, the categorical imperative and the universalism and stuff like that he would find objectionable.

9:10 Wes: Yeah. He rails against the categorical imperative. What is the. Let's see. Well, it's in five. He talks about the categorical imperative as a refined servility, so that those who are too proud to serve earthly masters, but they need to be a servant of something because they lack the will and the spirit to be their own masters. So they subject themselves instead to the categorical imperatives.

9:34 Dylan: I think that point about the surveying yourself is important because one of the things that gets lost, I think in Nietzsche's constant glorification of the Dionysian is to forget or miss the discipline that he expects. And I think it's also kind of hard to sort out at times what that means. There's a combination of deep spiritedness and integrity with a lot of discipline that isn't a discipline of adhering to exactly what other people say.

10:06 Wes: Yeah, Part of that discipline is there's a lot in here where truth seeking and skepticism are valorized. He's for these things.

10:16 Mark: Right. So that's the irony in why we need a gay science and why sometimes it's like you're reading the popular kid or the. You're just trying to figure out how to get on their good side and it seems like any particular strategy you pursue, then in the next aph. Resume he's going to say, no, that's not it. It's really, man, are you really even being consistent here? But this really all comes out of a rigorous, I would say Socratic attempt at self criticism. That it is so rigorous that it extends even to criticism itself. Right. That just taking as a foundational impulse the will to truth, this criticism that itself is something that needs to be analyzed or at least acknowledged, you know, that.

That it's not a self evidently rational thing to do to criticize. And so I mean this gets at what you were saying about asceticism. Well, all science where science is not taken as experimental science what we think of as the physical sciences or something now, but just any attempt to be systematic about knowledge, which even as a philologist is something that he was. That he was trained in. So he wants to be scientific on the one hand, he wants to be rigorous in questioning things, but on the other hand he sees the typical scientists demeanor of let's slow down and analyze this.

That there are limitations in that too, that that needs to be questioned. That there's something boorish and dull and stupid about the typical scientific demeanor. Exactly. Because it comes down to this asceticism, the will to truth above all else. That there's something kind of crazy about that. So you need to be suspicious of that even while you're trying to be thoroughgoing in your questioning and your intellectual conscience is at full operation.

12:02 Wes: Yeah. And when we say will to truth it gets tricky because we can really mean two things by that. One of them, from our discussion of On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense. Will to truth can mean basically what amounts to a commitment to metaphysical constructs. And the conclusion of truth and lie is basically that what he calls a drive for truth in that essay is actually grounded in this fabricating an artistic and instinctual, fundamentally instinctual drive. Ironically, the drive for truth is instinctual at bottom, but what it does when it becomes illegitimate, it hides its instinctual origin from itself.

We see that criticism in the Truth and lie essay, and we see a lot of that criticism in the gay science. It hides the instinctual origin from itself. And part of its way of doing that is confusing. And here he's sort of using a neo Kantian epistemology, but it confuses appearances with things in themselves. Now, there's a broader sense of will for truth which Nietzsche advocates, I think, in the gay science all over the place where he's advocating being critical and doubtful and being an inquirer and being a truth seeker. I don't think he has anything bad to say about that broader sense.

I think it becomes ascetic and it becomes illegitimate for Nietzsche when it descends into this equation of this sort of religious and metaphysical and moralistic, those sorts of truths.

13:24 Mark: I guess I just see him more as walking a tightrope here.

13:28 Wes: Yeah.

13:29 Mark: So when he says stuff like he praises the Greeks for their purposeful shallowness, he's talking about this in regard to Greek artistry, Greek tragedy. This is in the preface. The Greeks were superficial, out of profundity.

13:42 Wes: Right.

13:43 Mark: To stop courageously at the surface, to adore appearance. Actually, that sounds very much like what you were just saying about Kant and the thing in itself.

13:51 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

13:52 Mark: If you're trying to plunge the depths of everything, then you end up being otherworldly about it. You end up just looking at, say, the skeptical arguments and, well, this isn't exactly as it appears to me. So therefore I should only care about the thing itself and not about these appearances. And then you end up being otherworldly and anti life. There's a moral downside.

14:12 Wes: The embracing appearances thing is interesting because your relationship to appearances becomes aesthetic. Right. You give up any determination of whether the appearance is a thing in itself or has a certain kind of relation to a thing in itself, or has some sort of metaphysical status. Yet again, that's related to the affirmation of the instincts. I think throughout the gay science, you see this sort of association between the instinctual and then this superficial appearance part. So section 54 and 107, I think those are the two other places where he calls for affirming the appearance.

So 54 we're stuck with these dreamlike appearances and knowing it as appearance and instinct is our way of prolonging it and continuing the dream. So there's a comparison there of this being stuck with appearances to being in a dreamlike state. And then 107 error is a kind of condition of human knowledge. And that all we have are the appearances would be unbearable if we didn't have art. And he calls art our goodwill towards appearance. So he's pivoting off Kant's notion of goodwill, which is the foundation of Kantian moral theory. But basically, when we direct our goodwill towards appearance as aesthetic phenomena, we make existence bearable.

That's his sort of positive account, his way of avoiding nihilism in the face of the death of God and all the things he's prophesying here.

15:27 Mark: I mean, it seems like there are three different things that are floating around here. One is the post Kantian metaphysical claim that we need to just forget about the thing in itself and pay attention to the world as experienced. We've established that in many, many other podcasts. Then was this issue that you were just discussing of the aesthetic turn of making things bearable, that this is a very sort of existentialist sounding claim that there are harsh truths such as that the origin of our knowledge is in error, right? Errors that were helpful to survival, and those things solidified.

And those are just us agreeing on things and really just dealing with the fact that God is dead and all this. What enables the philosopher to be awesome, to go beyond conventional thinking, conventional mores, is in part this aesthetic turn. So that's the second theme. But then I just want to get back to the one that I do think if you look back at the preface right near the end of it, there is some sort of criticism of the unfettered will to truth. He says one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover and put in a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons.

No, this bad taste, this will to truth, this truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us. For that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn. We have lived too much to believe this today. We consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked or be present at everything, or to understand and know Everything. And then two paragraphs later is talking about the Greeks and their superficiality out of profundity.

And so that sounds like, you know, it's being skeptical about the process of inquiry itself, that it's the basis of the partially examined life, that not only is there something impossible about having true objective knowledge of everything, especially not all at once, but there's something undesirable in it as well. We have to keep in mind why we're doing inquiry in the first place, which I think is a lot of what this book is about is what is inquiry as a human activity, that it's something arising out of needs, that something arises out of instincts.

But like everything, it's sort of, once it's established as a practice, it gets a life of its own. And this will to truth and can be carried to a dangerous excess.

17:50 Wes: Yeah, and I think he says a lot in here about how the inability to tolerate uncertainty leads to these metaphysical claims and leads to moral claims and ascetic ideals he's very in favor of. And there are a number of passages where he advocates being able to tolerate uncertainty and basically advocating skepticism. The word skeptical and skepticism reappear throughout the text. So it's not about not being an inquirer per se or a scientist, but it's about not foreclosing on questions, not pretending to have knowledge that you don't really have.

So, you know, positing easy answers to things, whether it's moral commandments or it's a metaphysical concept of the soul, or it's God in a way, it's still a kind of Socratic ideal, which is for Plato and Socrates, this was doxosophia, conceit of wisdom, not pretending to know things that you can't know. And it falls in line also with the Kantian critique, which is about putting limits on knowledge, saying knowledge has its limits. And we get into these sort of metaphysical errors when we make these illegitimate applications, when we treat, say, the conditions of the possibility, in Kant's case of experience, as if they were objects of experience.

Nietzsche is pivoting off that call to not do that and treat appearance as appearance.

19:08 Dylan: Well, and Nietzsche's at the end is the second to last aphorism where he talks about his own writing and the question of being understandable. He says that the way he writes, especially now with this aphoristic style, is in some sense a consequence of the desire for truth, but the comfort with uncertainty. So the fact that he's non systematic is a. He's not writing a critique of pure Reason the way Kant would write, because

19:38 Wes: it's not because he has Attention Deficit disorder, which he's redefining as cheerfulness. No, I'm just kidding.

19:48 Dylan: Well, he's avoiding the pitfall of too much will to truth and fetishizing truth in that way. It's not that he's. It's merely skepticism, but it's that the activity of truthfulness is not the highest virtue.

20:05 Wes: Yeah. I think mentioning the writing is good because I think for people who might think the gay science is a weird title. And what do gayness and science have to do with each other? Even if you understand the gayness as cheerfulness? And what do art and science have to do with each other? But I think for Nietzsche, you can understand it in a very personal way. And it's a kind of thing that I experienced. And maybe, Mark, you might have experienced this too, but for someone who. He was out to be a scholar and he wrote an essay. I think that was his doctoral thesis, right? Yeah. The birth of Tragedy.

20:41 Dylan: Yeah.

20:41 Wes: Which was basically an essay instead of a dissertation with all the footnotes. So someone might say, well, isn't this really just a playing out of your conflict about whether or not you want to be a writer or whether or not you want to be a scholar? Because a scholar is one version of scientist. Nietzsche is using science in the broad sense. So that's one way I think of getting at this is for those of us who've tried to plow through academic writing. That's a very good example of a place where the Dionysian and the artistic are often lacking and the will to truth has gone too far.

Because often you see people who don't care about writing, they don't care about style. In some cases, they don't care about clarity. In other cases, they care about clarity to the exclusion of having anything to say and to the exclusion of, let's say, beauty. The aesthetic stops being a consideration for many scholars, which I think is unfortunate. I'm reading my own personal experiences into Nietzsche. But that may be one of his motivations.

21:40 Mark: Let me read part of 381 there. I don't want either my ignorance or the liveliness of my temperament to keep me from being understandable to you, my friends. Not the liveliness, however much it compels me to tackle matter swiftly, to tackle it at all. For I approach deep problems like cold baths, quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down is the superstition of those Afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water. They speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift. And to ask this incidentally, does a matter necessarily remain ununderstood and unfathomed merely because it has been touched only in flight, glanced at in a flash?

Is it absolutely imperative that one settles down on it, that one is brooded over it as an egg? At least there are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly that must be surprised or left alone. I didn't find this convincing at all. Frankly. I feel like any of the things that he touches on in a quick aphorism and then returns three aphorisms later to peck a little more at him, make a point at that. These could be dealt with without lack of insight in a somewhat more systematic way. And certainly every writer who writes about Nietzsche and tries to come up with a system for him or say what his views on ethics actually are, is violating his own recommendation.

22:57 Wes: But it couldn't be done without draining his writing of some of its vitality.

23:02 Mark: Is that draining it of insight, making it less fun?

23:06 Dylan: I think from Nietzsche's perspective it seems to me that it'd be draining from his activity as a human being and a philosopher. It drains it of that will to power.

23:19 Mark: Not seeing how that term works in there. He's a Dionysian spirit. Is that what you're trying to say?

23:24 Dylan: That I think they go hand in hand.

23:26 Mark: His self expression, his creativity. He definitely talks about philosophy as giving birth, as creating something. That does seem a different metaphor. I'm not sure how that jives with this. You know, you have to catch some issues unawares to. That doesn't sound like I'm creating something to do with it. It sounds like I'm bursting into some unknown area on some new perspective and getting an insight. If you think about it too much, if you settle down too much on it, then inevitably you start relating it to everything else. You know, you start making it familiar.

And that actually you may lose something out of that. Because he really does emphasize. So here's me trying to answer my own question. Why. Why this quick glimpses might actually be legitimate on his view is because so much of what good philosophy is is trying to get beyond your current perspective, get beyond the familiar to see something striking. And you know, it's difficult to do that. I think according to him in a premeditated way, that that's part of the gayness is this being life as a philosopher. But I'm not sure how to completely apply that.

I certainly can apply that to like writing a song. But I don't know if I felt that way about my own philosophical insights. Certainly I've had times where I'm scribbling madly in my notebook or whatever, and it feels very much like writing a song. It's a very similar experience. But it's unclear to me from that that it follows that that is the only way of getting at some insights or not.

24:49 Dylan: He sees great danger in the sedimentation of systematizing. There is the will to truth that needs to be constantly tempered and kept roaming. If your intellect feels like it's figured everything out, then that is the surest sign that you need to move on. You need to constantly be confronting it with problems. And if anything, there's a faith in the limitless depths of problems to humanity. They just won't ever go away. The fact that that's true allows you to have a gay science that you can delight in the fact that there are constantly these problems.

And he says something about this in the end of three in the preface. The attraction of everything problematic. The delight in an X, however, is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze. Over all the distress of what is problematic, over all danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover, we know a new happiness.

25:58 Mark: Does anybody else see this as the whole thing is a perfect complement, in a way, to Popper from a couple episodes ago? That Popper thinks that our regular faculties for getting knowledge, none of them are flawless. And in fact they get us error more often than not. We sort of start at a position of error. And that's something that Nietzsche definitely believes that what we consider truth traditionally. And he lists all these things like causality and substance, being, having, their being, being continuous, all these things are just errors. He thinks these things that we sort of fixed on, they were helpful to believe, to keep life going.

And so these became things that we just agreed on and we started calling them truth. But they're no sort of less erroneous than anything else. Well, if you really have a respect for objectivity, if you really have a respect for truth, then you don't accept these things just as they are handed down to you, that you're continually sort of battering at problems, even discovering problems, and trying to get at things from a different perspective, come up with new explanations, and you get the connection.

27:02 Dylan: Well, definitely, in terms of the problem solving, I get the connection.

27:05 Mark: And that we are fallibilists. So the will to truth means you don't get snared down in, in a stable theory. Once you build a system like Freud, like Marx, then you start to see everything in terms of the system. You need to free yourself from that kind of thing in order to be open to advances in knowledge and in fact looking for ways to falsify Popper's term. But I think that that's something that Nietzsche considers too, that once we consider something a basic assumption of our. So even the will to truth itself or the fact that the world is reasonable and understandable, that once you realize that that is an underlying presupposition of your inquiry, then you make that into a philosophical problem itself.

And there's no pre established methodology, there's no objective epistemic method that you can pull out of your ass and say, oh, that's how I'm going to get at even determining whether this is a real problem and thereby solving it. That the whole thing is much more, I would say ad hoc but really ultimately is much more of a creative endeavor than that. This discovery of problems and discovery of ways of questioning things and insights to solving the problems or evolving the problems is a creative act.

28:20 Dylan: Am I right to say that for Nietzsche everything's much more about becoming than being?

28:25 Mark: He does say, like in 112 he's talking about cause and effects and he says our explanations are just description. This is, this is just the, the point that Hume has made before. What we really are is confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, right? The cause and the effects. And he even says that a better description if you're really going to say what we experience is flux. So that sounds as Heraclitean as anything can be. And he specifically says elsewhere that continuity of being. Right. What Parmenides believes even brings up Parmenides is an error.

28:59 Wes: Can I just elaborate on 112? What he's doing in 112 is he's deflating our concept of explanation and the satisfaction we get out of that. Because ultimately if we think about what we're left with, with causality is we're just left with a brute association. And I think he gives the example of a chemical process and then some sort of property associated with that chemical process. But we could think of other examples. And he's also thinking about this in terms of Hume's skepticism about causality and Kant's response to that. So Kant, in a way he sort of accepts Hume's skepticism about causality, but then he's trying to resurrect it within his system and the way he does that is to say.

Well, insofar as it's applicable to appearances, it's a legitimate objective concept because appearances are things that we construct according to causality. And at the end of that Section 112, Nietzsche points out, though that's kind of a. That leaves us with a very thin usefulness for causality and explanation, because what are we applying causes to lines and bodies and these little constructions we've made, Causality gets this very limited applicability. For Kant, that saves us, gives us objectivity back. But for Nietzsche, that's just this world of artistic fabrication.

The cognitive faculties are fundamentally fabricating and artistic.

30:23 Mark: Yeah, even though these are fabricated, we can't. He says in 110, there are people that are trying to be true skeptics and live as if they don't believe these errors like causality, but they're just fooling themselves. Like whether it's built into human nature or just so sedimented in our habits, that's not something we can know in advance. But later in that same section in 110, he says the question is to what extent can truth endure incorporation? In other words, to extent. If we discover that our notion of cause is something that only applies to things we basically made up, can we actually incorporate that insight into our lives in any meaningful way? So that's an open question for him.

31:01 Wes: Well, I think enduring incorporation means to what extent do we endure it in the sense of truth can harm life. Right. Truth can be antithetical to life. But he's an advocate of this right. I mean, he's an advocate of the radical skeptic and the one who doubts. Because the alternative is the very things he's objecting to, which is the easy metaphysical explanations. And he starts 110 with that. These presuppositions about substance and equality and free will and the good and things like that.

31:28 Dylan: He wants to go along with the notion that there are things to figure out about the world, but make the point that those are constructions that we build to understand the world. Going back to what you were saying about we're not getting to the thing in itself, but we're getting to an articulation that is based upon what we know as human beings. That sometimes is just a consequence of how we interact with the world. He says in 112, the second paragraph, it will do to consider science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible. As we describe things in their one after another, we learn how to describe ourselves more and more precisely.

So causality, there is part of the way in which we describe the world, but it's also something that is going to be done as faithfully as possible. That, to me, is where the notion of truthfulness is going to come in. It's not a truthfulness that is a simple minded, overarching rule of the world, but it's a faithfulness to the appearances as well as to our own intellects.

32:30 Wes: Well, he says humanize, right? Humanize things as faithfully as possible. This is kind of a little bit satirical or sardonic, right? Most people would say, well, this idea that we anthropomorphize or we humanize in our knowledge of the world is a criticism. It's another way of saying there's a barrier between us and the ultimate truth of things in themselves. So even if you're doing that as faithfully as possible, you're still humanizing and learning about yourself as opposed to learning about how the world is in itself. That's sort of the point there, I think.

32:59 Dylan: Well, but I think both of those things are going on, right? On the one hand, the criticism that you are not learning about the thing in itself, you're learning about, in some important way, something about human beings. But there's also a notion of it being done as faithfully as possible. And I don't know that I read that necessarily as sardonic.

33:17 Wes: Well, look at what comes after cause and effect. Such a duality probably never exists. He's pivoting off the idea that when we're dealing with this world of Kantian objectivity, we're dealing with something we've constructed but continue on.

33:29 Dylan: In truth, we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only at isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it.

33:38 Wes: The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us. Actually, it is sudden only for us. I think he's talking here about our being mired in error. So for Kant, Kant thought he had saved objectivity. And Kant said, no, we don't have access to things in themselves, but we can think that there are such things. And for Nietzsche, it's absurd to even think the thing in itself. But then he's always going on, and we discuss this a little bit in our On Truth and Lie podcast, but he's on and on about how being stuck with the world of appearance is being stuck with errors.

But that's not a conclusion that. That a pragmatist or a neo Kantian who had rejected the concept of the thing in the self would accept because it implies the thing in itself. It implies that to have the truth, we must have the thing in itself. And if we don't have that, if we're stuck with appearance, then we're in this world of error. And this is sort of one of the inconsistencies and I think places where Nietzsche would rightly be criticized. In what sense do you mean error if you've rejected the concept of the thing in itself?

34:34 Mark: Yeah, I just think even though he occasionally says snarky things about Kant, he does not consistently think in Kantian terms. Most of the aphorisms we've looked at just don't make any reference to the thing in itself. So 109, I think, is one that's the beginning of this section that we've been reading that includes causality and error through history, and truth is just agreed upon error and that kind of stuff. He starts talking about what's the proper way to think of nature. It's not an organism, it's not a machine. So in other words, don't think of it the way scientists might think of it, the way Newton might think of it as obeying laws or something. It's not reasonable, but it's also not unreasonable. He says no aesthetic or moral judgments apply to it. There is no purpose, but there's also no accident. So this all goes into this de. Deification of nature.

35:15 Wes: Right, Right.

35:16 Mark: Actually, what kicks off book three, right before that, in 108, is his first statement that God is dead. Right. But the rest of this is we have to vanquish his shadow, that the religious viewpoint is really what has given us this idea that nature makes sense, that all this can be understood in the way that Newton thought. Right. Newton thought that science works because God is great and is understandable, very much like Aristotle.

35:39 Wes: But not just that, but the shadows of God include all these little metaphysical presuppositions that slip into our language even if we think of ourselves as atheists. And in fact, at a certain point, nihilistic atheism itself will be just another shadow of God. Even the reactive atheists haven't really escaped.

35:56 Mark: That was what you said about Romanticism, too, the Romanticism. It sounded like it's a rejection of this Newtonian, very organized, very. We're gonna go to chaos and Dionysian. But that's as a reaction. It also hasn't escaped the overall paradig.

36:11 Wes: Nihilism is the core of the ascetic ideal. Right. It's your most purified form of the drug. It's the same drug as Christianity. Atheism, reactive. Atheism like that is the same drug as Christianity. It's just its purest form. It's ascetic ideal taken to its extreme.

36:25 Mark: Yes.

36:26 Dylan: Right around in section 109. I'll just read this part. He says the character of the world, however, is in all eternity, chaos in the sense, not of a lack of necessity, but a lack of order, arrangement, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. So that juxtaposition, it's not a lack of necessity, but a lack of order and other such things as being the distinction about the way the world is. It's what I had in mind when I was thinking about the use of faithfulness, I guess the way of putting the question. And maybe Wes, you would say he's just inconsistent on this. But is the distinction between cause and effect and necessity.

37:06 Wes: Yeah, he says there are no laws, they're just necessities. Right. Yeah.

37:10 Dylan: When there's just necessities. And this will come back, along with the love of fate, amor fati and eternal recurrence, stuff like that. That there is deep necessity, but it's somehow not what we think of. He doesn't mean what we think of as cause and effect. Pulling those two apart seems to me actually a little bit hard.

37:29 Wes: I thought that was. That was just cause and effect. Yeah.

37:33 Mark: Is there another passage or. I'm not sure I'm getting the difference.

37:36 Wes: So he's objecting the law, the use of the word law. Right. That's an anthropomorphism, because a law implies a lawgiver.

37:42 Dylan: Well, he's saying that the world is in all eternity chaos in the sense, not of a lack of necessity, but a lack of order. So that, to me means that the character of the world is chaos, but does have necessity.

37:54 Wes: Yeah. So the chaos is the lack of order. So he's just been objecting to these aesthetic anthropomorphisms by saying, look how beautiful the cosmic order is. Look how orderly everything is. If you look at.

38:05 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

38:06 Wes: And he's saying, yeah, there are necessities in the sense. There's gravity and there's cause and effect, but it's actually not that orderly. Just because there's cause and effect, that doesn't produce order in the sense that we think of it when we're doing this aesthetic anthropomorphism, which is to say this beautiful whole. Right. If we were really to break it down, it's just sound and fury signifying nothing. It's necessary sound and fury. And certain states of affairs constrain other states of affairs. But it's not this big, beautiful, ordered whole.

38:33 Dylan: Yeah, but this makes the objection earlier about cause and effect more subtle in that it's not a denial of cause and effect. It's the denial of the extrapolation of

38:42 Mark: cause and effect mean that we can actually observe it.

38:45 Dylan: Yeah. And that, oh, we have cause and effect. And therefore now we can just follow the effects back to the causes over and over and over again until we get to the one true thing. And that step is a kind of corruption of the will to truth. It's taking it too far.

38:58 Mark: But he does believe in personal determinism. Right. As opposed to free will. He's a straight up determinist about our own. If you're looking at why you have a certain idea or why you made a certain choice, you should very much look to your physical constitution and other things like that and your character.

39:15 Wes: Actually, this is where character becomes important because we'll see when he talks about people becoming themselves, these sort of everyone having their own values, those things will come out an amor fati, accepting what's necessary. In a way, he's saying we will form our values based on who we are. Instead of these universal moral corrections which are supposed to apply to all human beings. Our laws for ourselves actually issue from our specific characters. And they're as unique as thumbprints.

39:43 Dylan: So it links up with the denial of cause and effect. But also earlier, when he's talking about the origin of the logical, in which he's really denying the sameness of things. We treat things that are equal, that are merely similar. And so when we do that, it's similar to the problem with cause and effect is that at the end of the day, going back to what Wes just said about characters, that each individual is utterly individual, utterly their own one thing. And so they're not the same as anything else. This means the kinds of extrapolations you can make, you can't hold them underneath a common set of laws. There may be similarities, but they are not samenesses. And then that difference is all the difference.

40:28 Mark: Well, and I think that should give you a clue of how to interpret his various statements that sound, say, racist. He talks a lot about groups of people or zeitgeists or characters. He either has to be talking purely about a zeitgeist, an abstraction, an idea. And to say the idea of Christianity is nihilism or something like that. Or he has to be talking at a very high level, you know, rules of thumb, because he can't be saying all Jews are the same and so they're all going to react in a similar way and at the same time think that everybody is unique in the way that you were talking about. So he can't be just making straightforwardly racist statements.

41:07 Wes: By the way, though most of what he in the body of his work has to say about Jews is positive.

41:12 Mark: Well, he still sees it as the foundation of Christianity and as ascetic in a certain way, as slavish in a certain way.

41:19 Wes: Yeah, but that's a criticism that pretty much goes for everyone. I mean, in a way that's just culture as such, going back to the genealogy of morals, once you have political hierarchy, then the weak are constrained in their instincts and then asceticism and through bad conscience will necessarily arise. It's similar to what we saw with the Freud civilization and its discontents. The curtailment of instinct that comes with human society makes us sick. For Freud, the solution was, I think, what he thought of as his gay science, which is psychoanalysis. And for Nietzsche, I don't think we've gotten to what exactly he means by gay science yet, although perhaps his book is one example of it, since we're

41:57 Mark: talking about the racist stuff here. So 140, I think, is the only one about Judaism that we, we assigned to ourselves. Too Jewish. If God wished to become an object of love, he should have given up judging injustice. First of all, a judge, even a merciful judge, is no object of love. The founder of Christianity was not refined enough in his feelings at this point. Being a Jew, that's just a joke

42:18 Wes: about the Old Testament. The Old Testament is the God of judgment. Yes. So Jews, because of the Old Testament represent judgmentality here. And.

42:26 Mark: Yeah, so how are you going to love that kind of God? Yeah, and that there's something weird about. And that being repurposed for the Christian God of love.

42:36 Wes: So too Jewish. I mean, this is a straight on stand up routine at this point. So yeah, you can accuse it of being racist or a comedian could get away with making a similar kind of joke.

42:45 Mark: Right. I know we already talked about this even in our earlier Nietzsche episodes. You know, whenever he talks about these groups, he's talking about attitudes and if you are Christian or Jewish or Buddhists, another one. And he sees those all as despising life in a certain way by turning toward something out of this world, you know, if you are a member of one of those sects or faiths or ethnicities and don't believe anything like that and think that you're perfectly life affirming, then well, that may well be true. And he's just not talking about. He's talking about particular attitude, not about a group of people in particular.

43:18 Wes: Yeah. And again, most of what he has to say about Jews is actually very positive. And he. There are many passages in which he's positively comparing Judaism to Christianity, which is the real target of his criticism. And then the question of whether it's race, specifically Christianity, it's the religious content that he's thinking about specifically, not the. Although no, you're probably right, he's thinking of race. He's thinking of everything. Right. Because that's character and physiology and everything that makes a people. I'm sure he's right.

43:47 Mark: He's talking about often position in society and this goes with women as well, that he's not necessarily dissing women as being inherently subservient or something like that. There's a point where he talks about women and about being an actor and earlier he said that actually being an actor is a sort of advance in culture, that in certain cultures you're born a shoemaker and that's what you are. And everybody just has their role and they take it upon with their whole being. Well, in his culture he thinks has advanced to a point where people are. They can't actually take them seriously as I'm just a shoemaker.

44:24 Wes: This is 356.

44:25 Mark: Yes, yes. So being an actor is an advance and actually it's what gets you then to treat these things as performances and really excel at them. Like if you're just born a baker, My father was a baker, I'm a baker, my kid will be a baker. Then maybe you just trudge on being a baker and doing things the way they were before. But if you find, well, okay, I find myself in this profession, maybe for all the same factual reasons, but you don't feel that that's what you are sort of with your essence. Well, either you might just say I don't want to be a baker anymore, or you might treat this as a new crazy challenge.

What I am is an individual and I want to make my mark. And then you make the most elaborate cakes anyone has ever made. So this is actually one of the foundations of new work. Just throw that in there of trying to make work, even whatever you're doing, make it meaningful, sort of take it on as a challenge, not Just as. As a law of nature that you are obeying somehow. So later when he's talking about Jews as being exceptional actors or women as being exceptional actors, he's saying that people, you know, this is very much like Hegel's master slave thing.

That anybody that is socially oppressed, like women, like Jews in his society, has to adapt in certain ways, has to

45:36 Wes: become an actor to adapt oneself to one's surroundings. Yeah, that's 361.

45:40 Mark: There's something in being put in the down position and having to adapt in this way that gives you a new way to excel. It makes you interesting, it makes you deep in a way that the masters in his master and slave morality picture, or Hegel's picture of master and slave.

45:57 Wes: Yeah, that's an interesting connection to Hegel there. Yeah, right.

45:59 Mark: There's something that the slave, by being oppressed, by having to look in upon himself and dissociate himself from what the master is making him do, gains a certain complexity and self consciousness that someone who's just a master, who is just in a position of power doesn't have.

46:17 Wes: Yeah, that's right. Actually in genealogy, in the essay two on Bad Conscience, it's the inward turning of instincts that actually carves out the space inside us that we call soul or psyche. And he uses that phrase, makes us interesting.

46:31 Mark: Yep.

46:32 Wes: We do not become human until we have been oppressed in some sense. And the instincts have to go inward because otherwise there's no force to create a mind, to create a spirit.

46:42 Mark: I think that's a great illustration of just his. I don't know if it's ambivalence, but it's complexity in how he sees moral development. That sounds like, oh, the masters are the good ones and the slaves have perverted morality. But no, there's actually something forward moving in this movement for master enslaved morality in this genealogy moral story that we already told, and he has that right from the beginning of this book where he talks about, you might think that what society considers good helps society survive. Right. If you go around killing everybody, then society would die out very quickly.

But really a lot of what society calls evil, this domination and things, is itself something that has helped society survive. That evil people and good people have been necessary to move society forward. That in fact the way natural selection works, if something really was anti life, if something really was against the preservation of the species, I should say not anti life of the individual, then it would have died out already. So the fact that you still see these different types means there's Something advantageous about both of them. And there's a complex dynamic there that he thinks at least gives the potential to move us forward to ever more exciting creative realms in morality.

47:58 Wes: Right. The first section in book one is just the kind of humorous riffing off this idea that, well, look, you're the product of millions of years of evolution and so probably no matter what you do, you're still a benefactor of the human race. That instinct was useful in some way. Even the lust to rob and hatred and all those things. So it's all species preserving.

48:24 Mark: Yes. And species, he says, pursue your best or your worst desires and above all perish. In both cases you are probably in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity. That us perishing to give way to the new is actually part of the system. Of course it is.

48:38 Wes: Well, not just that, but behaviors which propagate the species. It's not the survival of the individual. Exactly. That's at stake, except that you have to survive a certain amount of time to reproduce. So if animals didn't have to reproduce. Right. That would be actually as individuals, they'd be better off because reproductive behavior is risky. There's a lot of things that are species preserving that are individually actually incredibly self destructive.

49:03 Mark: Yeah. And then realizing that in some ways a self contradiction in our own instincts, you might say, is to do something. Like when Camus was saying we all have to take on the absurd, we all have to realize, not turn away from it. And the way that Nietzsche talks about it is to laugh at oneself out of the whole truth. This is from section one. And likewise, even saying that the good and the evil, that these are both part of the system, part of the preservation of the human species. Likewise, to seriously put forth a positive idea, something that we can gather around, make these errors into truths that we all agree on and we cling to that itself was one of the things that helped preserve us.

There's a reason that that kind of stuff is so common, this desire for certainty, but yet also part of the system is we philosophers talking about himself, who then undermine all this, who challenge stuff. And in fact that's exactly connected to the good and the evil. Later he talks about that anybody that challenges the status quo in terms of ideas is called evil at the time.

50:06 Wes: Right. The madman's joy and unreason, the danger to the species doubt is madness. That's section 110 I was interested in

50:15 Dylan: back in the stuff about actors and acting in 360 just because I keep thinking about causes. He has this distinction between two Kinds of causes that are confounded. And the direction that people have in which they have a goal versus the directing force for their lives. He says, I have learned to distinguish the cause of acting from the cause of acting in a particular way, in a particular direction, with a particular goal.

50:43 Wes: Goal.

50:43 Dylan: And at the end, he says, people are accustomed to consider the goal, purposes, vocations, etc. As the driving force. In keeping with a very ancient error. But it is merely the directing force. One has mistaken the helmsman for the steam, and not even always the helmsman. The directing force. And is the goal the purpose? Not often enough a beautifying pretext, a self deception of vanity after the event that does not want to acknowledge that the ship is following the current into which it has entered accidentally. That it wills to go that way because it must.

That it has a direction, to be sure, but no helmsman at all. We still need a critique of the concept of purpose. So there are a couple things going on there. One is the notion that we're fundamentally contextual and that there's a kind of determinism to our character, that we will be realizing it. And he wants to make the distinction between the kind of goals that we set before ourselves as being the reason for that motion as the end point, when actually it's just the activity that's going on itself. What I find myself is. I want to end up reading into him a strong creative aspect to living.

In which one is fashioning one's life. And he says stuff like that. Yeah, a kind of creative life.

52:08 Wes: A kind of life is literature, style to one's character.

52:12 Dylan: Yes. In which one is actively participating in the molding of one's character. But then he also has this sort of heavily contextualized, fatalistic, and kind of a Greek sense of fate that we cannot even resist the necessity of our lives. We haven't talked much about eternal recurrence. But embedded in that notion is realizing that what we are is the sum of all that has come before. And that everything will happen again exactly as it has before. And there's a kind of living such that everything that would happen and understanding everything that has happened has to have happened, no matter what kind of judgment we would make about it. And I find those two in fundamental tension with one another.

52:59 Wes: When he says becoming oneself, that's 270. What does your conscience say? You shall become the person you are now. What does bad conscience or guilt do? There's a lot of railing against guilt in this. Well, that's the instrument of morality. Where you say, no, you're not supposed to do this. You're supposed to reshape your character according to moral norms. He says, you shall become the person you are. I think he's saying you embrace the character that you are. Which is to say, you embrace your personal necessity. That goes along with 276, where he's embracing love of fate. So you embrace your own necessity, which is the same thing as embracing your own character.

53:39 Dylan: Yeah.

53:39 Mark: Amor Fatih, let that be my love. Henceforth, I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all, and on the whole, someday, I wish to be only a yes sayer.

53:54 Wes: And if we go to 290, where he's talking about one thing is needful. To give style to one's character. A great and rare art. So that's a kind of. I think Dylan, as you mentioned, that place where it sounds like maybe he's saying one ought to reshape one's character aesthetically, but I think it's more about the view one takes of one's own character. So you survey all the strengths and weaknesses of your nature, and then you fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art. So I think there's an artistic whole, even if some of the parts are ugly, which goes with what Mark just said about ugliness. So some of it is about changing our relation to ourselves, which I think involves jettisoning guilt and jettisoning moral commandments, which I associate with the attempt to radically refashion character as opposed to simply live out one's character.

54:46 Mark: I think we should read a little more of that, just because this is really one of the most important passages in here, and this is close to sort of an ethics. This is what you should do. This is the one thing that is needful. Is it purely a matter of reinterpretation? Because he says here a large mass of second nature has been added. There our piece of original nature has been removed both times through long practice and daily work at it, which doesn't sound like just interpretation. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed. There it has been reinterpreted and made sublime.

Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views. It is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything Large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose if only it was a single taste. So in other words, take control of yourself and live artistically means seeing yourself in certain ways is part of the process of changing yourself in certain ways.

If something is difficult for you, well, don't freaking emphasize that and labor over it and feel guilty about that. Laugh about that and emphasize something else.

55:52 Wes: Yeah, I think Dylan has to be right. There has to be some self shaping.

55:55 Mark: Yep.

55:55 Wes: In a related note, there are these other areas where he's talking about we are our own standard bearers, we issue our own ideals. So in 120, where he's talking about health of the soul, he wants the maximum virtue is the health of the soul. To become your virtue is the health of your soul. And then in this and other sections, including 143 and 144, we get talk of basically each person being this radically individual. Right. And because of that, which I take to be because of their specific characters, they have their own individual good. Sort of still sounds like an Aristotelian type of teleological ethics. But instead of saying, well, there's a human nature and my good is determined by that, there's a West nature and my good is determined by that. It's actually specific and each person is radically different. And when we speak ethically, we have to think in terms of. Of the individual.

56:51 Mark: But that doesn't mean we can't make some generalizations and argue in favor of the Dionysian, for instance, against the life denying. Buddhist, Christian, Jewish.

57:01 Wes: The generalization is that health is the standard of value. That's the generalization. But each person's health is different.

57:08 Mark: Right. Can I just point out in 120 that you just looked at, not only is there no normal health and so health will look different in different people, sickness is itself necessary for growth. Right. Just like becoming the slave makes you interesting and gives you these new psychological powers as an individual going through a period of sickness. He talks about a lot of this, even in the intro that after embracing romanticism for a while, I rejected that and took a more sort of straightforwardly ascetic line. And that itself was a sickness. And now I'm emerging from that, you know, so sometimes he talks about it like it was a physical sickness and sometimes it was like a spiritual sickness.

But in either case, being immersed in that is the only thing that enables him to then be as maximally creative and take on this project of gay science itself. The sickness is necessary for growth and so in 120 says that the will to health alone, that maybe that's a prejudice, cowardice, it's subtle barbarism and backwardness. And this is also why he says pity is so misconceived. Because if somebody else is going through a hard time, you don't understand that, okay. Their grief, their suffering is individual. And for you to pity them is to kind of reduce them to one of your possessions and oh, I understand your.

No, you don't. Don't even try. Let them live in dignity with their suffering so they can grow with that. So even health is not a. There is no single standard of value at all.

58:31 Wes: That passage on pity, that's 338. He also points out that happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that grow up together or remain small together. And that's one of the criticisms of this drive simply towards comfort or towards a value where you simply minimize suffering. Utilitarianism.

58:49 Mark: Yeah.

58:50 Wes: Because if you get rid of suffering, you also get rid of joy. The path to joy is. Yeah, there's a lot of suffering along the way.

58:56 Mark: Becoming like a super philosopher, like he's advocating becoming truly critical and putting yourself out there and discovering new points of view and things is actually to make yourself more sensitive, more liable to suffering in certain ways. Just to be a great person means you're opening yourself up to both great joy and great suffering in a way that a smaller person won't.

59:21 Wes: Right.

59:22 Dylan: He would agree in this kind of Aristotelian sense that we ought to do what is most fitting for our own end. And so the wrestler is going to eat a lot more food than someone who is smaller and not a wrestler. And that's going to be the appropriate for their end. And there's going to be similar kinds of things for the ends of everybody. That's going to be very individual. But am I right that he cautions against moderation? He doesn't explicitly do this. And so maybe I'm just trying to just read something into him. Well, it.

59:55 Mark: Live dangerously. That's pretty explicit. Yeah.

59:58 Dylan: So it's a kind of vigorousness that. I don't know. He seems to have a soft spot for a kind of rashness that at the end you may pull back from and in fact it will contribute to your own growth as a person. Even though he recoils from his youthful love of the overly romantic and anti Semitic Wagner, he doesn't seem like he would consider that a mistake exactly, but something that helped him become who he was.

1:00:29 Mark: Yeah. And so it becomes difficult. It's like we each have our own journey, our own path. But he certainly has no problem with, let's talk. Let me share my wisdom with you, which presumably will help you recognize this structure and figure out your own path, but yet don't do just what I do. In fact, I'm going to talk in such a cryptic way that you can't actually just nod at everything I say. I'm going to say things that sound so over the top that you're going to have to go, ah, no, I must think for myself.

1:00:58 Dylan: How would Nietzsche judge illness and health of a soul, even in his own case? So we just said that he doesn't necessarily consider illness bad in the sense of, on the whole, there are going to be times that are going to be important for a soul to be ill in order for it to be healthy, to understand health at all. But that doesn't mean that being ill doesn't then present a direction that the soul ought to go towards health in some way. Right. It's not that you would. You can hold at the same time the notion that there's always going to be illness and health, and then in fact, they come together and that illness is somehow necessary for health.

To also not consider illness as some kind of fetishized virtue that we. Oh, we have to feel bad all the time. It's not that either. Right. And in fact, it wouldn't seem to deny that you go towards health. And so I'm left wondering about judging health and illness in a soul, by

1:02:03 Wes: and large, by the way, I think his standard is health. And yet at the end of 120, he says the great question will still remain whether we can really dispense with illness. So it's a question that's a fundamental question of how we can ground teleological ethics. Right. How we can get normative judgments, whether it's about physical health or psychological health or morality. What's good simply out of looking at the functioning of an organism or a human being. I think for Aristotle, in a way, it's kind of imminent. The good is just part of what's there in the world. It's part of the functional apparatus of an organism.

1:02:41 Dylan: But in Aristotle's case, the development of habit. Two images come to mind. One is a constant oscillation where you go from one extreme to another to the extent that you're regulated by habit, and let's say you do a good job at it, you're going to be swinging back and forth across this line of appropriate moderation but you'll oscillate less and less and less as you grow older and wiser until you track that line of what you are. Well, and there's also the image that comes to mind of kind of whittling away and shaping into who you are. I see the latter in Nietzsche, but the former I don't see as much in Nietzsche.

This idea that our activity in making ourselves is one of. On the one hand, he says, we become who we are. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be an implied stability to that gaiety. There seems to be a kind of, well, living dangerously, so that it's constantly pushing at boundaries rather than getting closer. So it's not asymptotic. The way Aristotle's understanding of oneself and one's virtue and one's ethics is. As you become wiser, you sort of become more asymptotically what you ought to be.

1:04:02 Mark: Right. Life is constant. Evolution is taking what is old and rotting in yourself and dismissing it. For Nietzsche, Yeah, it doesn't seem like there's any endpoint there.

1:04:11 Dylan: It's convulsive in the way evolution is. Right. It's constant generation and corruption and then regeneration. And so it's just dirtier and more painful and more ecstatic.

1:04:25 Mark: You know, he talks about himself as a wave sometimes and also talks about having cycles in terms of there's a time to be ascetic, to remove yourself from the world, and then there's a time to go out and connect with people. And, you know, there's a lot of this has to do with. That's just the natural rhythms of the way our energy works. Again, referring back to that engine versus the guide that ultimately what determines a lot of what we do is just our level of energy. And then it will exert itself in various ways. So, yeah, it's going to come in cycles and waves. So even for yourself, pursuing one particular kind of living is not going to be a consistent thing.

1:05:03 Dylan: Well, but how does that jive with the idea of becoming who we are? I mean, he's strongly teleological in this way.

1:05:09 Wes: I mean, he never directly says what Mark just said. Right, mark, that's your inference 26.

1:05:14 Mark: What is life continually shedding something that wants to die? Being cruel against everything about us that is growing old and weak, being without reverence for the old and dying.

1:05:22 Wes: Right, but isn't that just another way of saying becoming who we are? I mean, it's.

1:05:25 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I guess he says, become who you are.

1:05:28 Wes: Right. Your psyche just like your body is this hierarchical system in the body, right? It's the relationship of the organs and in the psyche there are all these different conflicting impulses and character logical traits and roles. And on the path to becoming who you are, you'll have to make choices. You'll have to discard some of those desires and impulses and even character logical features.

1:05:53 Dylan: So I mean, the obvious question here. Well, there are two things. One is still is unclear about how becoming who you are jives with making who you are in creating who you are. But there's also the idea is, well, is there anything normative in a very broad sense about who anyone is in which we would understand certain kinds of who people are as corruptions of themselves. Right. Or do we say that, well, look, you know, anybody, no matter how despicable, we could pick things that we would consider in some kind of normal everyday way a despicable human being and is not their out just to say, well, that's who I am. I'm just maximizing exactly what I am. And you know, I am a pedophile rapist. That is exactly who I am. That is what kind of being I am. And to deny that of me is wrong.

1:06:54 Wes: We've gotten to the Leopold and Loeb question here.

1:06:57 Mark: Yes, as usual, Nietzsche doesn't. When he's sort of talking about evaluating himself and talking about what is virtue, even though he barely ever uses that word. It almost never has to do with interpersonal relations. I mean, he says at one point, you know, part of being great is being able to be cruel. But then you look in the footnote and Kaufman says, well, he's just talking about the fact that he had to be brave enough to write things that would make his mom upset. Yeah, that's what he meant.

1:07:24 Dylan: The notion of cruelty here is a pretty low bar.

1:07:27 Wes: Many of Kaufman's footnotes are often. They're not useful.

1:07:32 Mark: I disagree. I found throughout my experience with Kaufmann that you're not just getting a translator here and somebody who explains what Wissenschaft means, but he was giving very regular like this is an important passage and people who misinterpret Nietzsche ignore this passage and you know, like a valuable secondary source right then and there.

1:07:50 Wes: Yeah, I shouldn't say it's all useless, but I think many of his footnotes are misinterpretations. So. But I think 143 is one of the places where we get this value pluralism where we say each individual gets to have their own ideal. It's where he's Praising polytheism. So sovereign individuals and what he calls the free spiriting and many spiriting of men. And he points out that morality and monotheism are hostile to this and threaten us with premature stagnation. We'll get to the Leopold and love question in a second. But it's clear what he thinks a corrupted human being is.

And it's someone who's guilty, someone who has bad conscience and has been made that way by slave morality and monotheism as opposed to. The reason why polytheism is important is because the many gods means you can have your own specific God, which in I think Nietzsche's case, you take to the extreme and you just say it's some idiosyncratic, that your ideal is specific to yourself. Everyone has their own God. And then that gets us to. Dylan, your question about. I think we talked about this a little bit in the no country for Old Men episode too.

What happens when. When you have someone who is constituted as a psychopath or as a child rapist or so on, and that is their good. They might want to say, this is my good, it's built into me.

1:09:06 Dylan: Or is Nietzsche just sanguine about this? Is that the criticism of him?

1:09:10 Mark: No, my interpretation is this whole thing is explicitly only aimed at certain people who are sort of worthy of him. That even though there's going to be a multiplicity of right ways to be. And you might look at somebody and say that looks really weird. Why are they doing that? But that's actually they're right where they should be, on their own path. And if you knew them better, then you would understand that. But still, there are many, many more ways to fail. And to fail, obviously. And it's not just a matter of if you feel guilty you're a failure.

Just in the same way that, well, okay, there are no certain sources of knowledge. No sources of knowledge, whether it be experience or reason, that will give us certain knowledge. But you can spot error. This is again me talking in pauper speak. There are lots of cases of error that are just inarguable and that he's going to look at these foolish Leopold and Loeb type people as just obviously failures.

1:10:05 Wes: He doesn't talk in these terms about failure in this book. Right. He talks about states of mind. He talks about whether you can achieve a certain kind of state of mind. So. So I mean, I'm leaving open the fact that he might be thinking the way you're talking, Mark.

1:10:19 Mark: Right. Well, he dismisses vast portions of the populace and those are just not who he's talking to in this book, so he doesn't have to really deal with that.

1:10:28 Wes: You're right about that. In the Genealogy of Morals, he's very explicit about this, which is that for most people, slave morality is the best they can aspire to. Basically, you've made the best of a bad situation, which is that you exist in a societal, a hierarchy, and you're given certain psychological tools through the ascetic ideal to cope with that. But it's for great men. It's for what he calls exceptions here in the gay science. It's for certain individuals who really have a certain kind of potential and also are fragile. He uses this word fragility at some point, are more fragile because of it and are kind of ruined by society because of their potential. I think that's. If you say it's a limited critique, I think that's who he's limiting it to certain types of what he calls higher types.

1:11:12 Mark: People like him. Isn't that pretty obvious? You know, he's like any artist who's ultimately talking about people that have had similar experiences and a similar temperament to his own.

1:11:25 Wes: Sensitive people. Yes. With all kinds of psychosomatic stomach ailments and other problems. Problems. Extremely neurotic people.

1:11:35 Mark: Just going back to your. The point about polytheism. I mean, I. I read this again genealogically, that he's saying, gosh, you know, we in history, we had for survival means, sort of cowered around. We all have to agree on the basic stuff. We all have to agree on the basic stuff. And then, wow, polytheism was a way to express individuality. That, like, there's actually conflict in nature. It's not just there's one God who tells us everything and this is how you should think and feel. But there are gods who have different impulses, different opinions, who are in conflict with each other. And so you can use that psychologically to express something that is against the norm because it's sort of part of, you know, the norm itself has become multivalent, has become multifaceted.

1:12:17 Wes: One was permitted to behold a plurality of norms. One God was not considered a denial of another God, nor blasphemy against him.

1:12:23 Mark: Right. But what this is really shooting for is not just that, that we're individuals, but that we can discover values. We can discover higher values, we can create. You know, creating a value is not just like, I decide for myself what's good. It's actually a discovery that something is valuable. He talks about right at the beginning of the whole book, the difference between Common and noble people. And noble people are those who get excited about things that the common people just. They can't see the point of. You know, the common people are just what is prudent, what is in my interest, what holds society together. Some kind of basic, very understandable things. Whereas maybe the noble person has gotten really excited about some obscure portion of art or of Latin poetry.

1:13:10 Wes: Discussion about the gay science.

1:13:11 Mark: Exactly. That these are the people. It's not that they're just arbitrarily coming up with some new crazy thing. It's that they're getting hooked into something that other folks have been blind to. And this is how values move forward. That all values, even the values that the herd has now were at some point created by people. And this is a very teleological picture. It's not a smooth evolution through time of value. You can have degenerate ages and things, but still, there's going to be a big difference between someone who is discovering new values and someone that just says, oh, it's okay for me to kill because I'm better.

1:13:47 Wes: Yeah, it's not a matter of free will or arbitrarily choosing some sort of value. And that goes along with what we were saying about becoming who you are in character. Right. Because for Aristotelian teleology, it's the structure of the organism. Right. The nature of that organism. But it's a more generalized nature. Character is just specific nature. So when we say. When we're determining what's good for us, we are looking specifically to our character because of that. Even though it's a discovery and not arbitrary. I don't know that that gets us away from the Leopold and Loeb question, the problem of a psychopath. Because that is their nature and their character. They are constituted that way. And the only way to reject that, it seems to me, is by comparing it to a standard of human nature, a more general standard.

1:14:32 Mark: Yeah, there are higher natures and there's the herd, and then there are just degenerates. He doesn't spell it out like that, but I see no problem.

1:14:40 Wes: Well, he doesn't talk about degenerates. Yeah. Let's be clear.

1:14:42 Mark: He's just not interested in that. In them.

1:14:45 Wes: Well, there's the herd. I don't know. I don't know about degenerates.

1:14:49 Dylan: You know, now that you mention it, I can't think of him talking about. I mean, he talks about the need to be evil and so forth, but it's always in this backdrop of Christian normativity and that his way of being provocative is to just, well, and the

1:15:07 Wes: evil man is always a great man, like a Napoleon, someone who's shaping society, doing these great things.

1:15:12 Dylan: Yeah. And this is where I think that maybe it's Nietzsche's own sort of love of nobility that's coming in. You know, to pick Napoleon as the evil man who's the great man just seems to me to misunderstand at least one part of evil. Right. The way in which you would see in Dostoevsky or something, the way in which the characters in Dostoevsky's novels struggle with evil. Right. The evil that Nietzsche always talks about is always grand in a kind of confrontation with society and society's norms. And so in this way, Socrates gets held up as being the evil one against the Athenians, as corrupting the youth. And therefore he's the great evil one. And in that way he's great and is the harbinger of change and so forth.

1:16:00 Mark: Yeah. As opposed to just a petty nihilist.

1:16:03 Dylan: As opposed to a petty nihilist or just, you know, which is what most

1:16:06 Mark: of your criminals would be.

1:16:07 Dylan: Yeah, I guess. I suppose criminals are nihilists or people who are psychopaths who believe that they understand what's right for everybody. People who are enslavers. I mean, when he talks about masters and slaves even, it's not even really understanding what people who actually have been enslaved, what's being done to them. It's a kind of slavery that is very bourgeois slavery of the preacher tells you make sure you don't steal things and always tell the truth and stuff like that. Not like genuine deep subjugation. His version of understanding that kind of subjugation is very bourgeois, it seems to me. Me it's not like the subjugation of a serf or African slave in 1860 or something like that.

1:16:53 Wes: Well, with slave morality though, he's thinking of actual Christian slaves in the Roman Empire though, right?

1:16:58 Dylan: I guess.

1:16:59 Wes: I mean, I think you're right in the sense that, yeah, if we call it slave morality today, it's manifestation, it's psychological. It's not like, yeah, people are actual slaves.

1:17:08 Mark: I can see his objection to your run of the mill petty criminal as not being an evil genius creating new values, that they're just reactions to the herd, they're part of the herd, but they're losing the herd's games. And so they just say, screw it all, I'm just gonna do what I want to do. They're not actually creating anything new. They're certainly not doing the philosophical work necessary to do that. They're just part of the same cloth.

1:17:36 Dylan: Yeah, but it's not even just petty criminals.

1:17:38 Wes: Right.

1:17:38 Dylan: You know, the world is full of petty tyrants. Be them tyrants of families or tyrants of the local school district or tyrants of countries who do horrible, horrible things as part of their tyrancy and their tyranny. Tyranny. Okay, thank you. Sorry, it's been a long tyrancy.

1:17:59 Wes: No, I liked it, too.

1:18:01 Dylan: It's her infancy, right?

1:18:02 Wes: Yeah.

1:18:04 Dylan: And so I guess I feel like Nietzsche opens himself up for this kind of problem in glorifying the great naysayers who maybe undoubtedly acted against what commonly was considered as good and were harbingers of change, and sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, but had some kind of greatness that was also positive in them. But those seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule regarding the way evil manifests itself. And it's not on his radar screen, like I said. I just don't know if he's sanguine about it or he's just too much of an aristocrat to even be concerned about it or not. I don't really know.

1:18:50 Wes: I don't think we can answer that.

1:18:51 Mark: Yeah, I think this is a rabbit hole.

1:18:53 Wes: One thing to reiterate, though, is psychopaths are people who don't feel guilt. And he spends a lot of this. There are numerous passages where he's basically arguing against guilt and bad conscience. I think that's critical. And on the other side of it, calling for affirmation and saying only yes, which is basically saying the same thing. So 250, which is called guilt, is where he's basically saying you're guilty of nothing. Guilt is an illusion. You're as guilty as witches were of witchery. And then actually 271 to 275 at the end of book three, in a way, I take those as all as related to guilt and shame and a rejection of those things.

In a way, I think of the gay science. When I started reading it, I was thinking of it as a sort of diatribe against guilt, against a harsh superego. From a personal level, I think that's probably what was going on. You sort of hear the voice of someone who is arguing against an overly severe conscience. But on the other hand, that can go too far. It's gay science. He talks about having a good conscience all the time. So it's not like you're getting rid of conscience. I don't know exactly what it means, but I Know that at least at the level of instinct versus rationality.

He's not arguing for jettisoning rationality and going for pure instinct. And he's probably not arguing for jettisoning conscience altogether. Right.

1:20:06 Mark: Conscience is actually another one of those things that even though it tortures people, that it also gave us a critical faculty, right. That the Christian morality, he said it allowed us to then view those old timey Greek sages with a critical eye and say, well, they're not really moral. And then once you get that, then we'll turn that against Christian morality itself. That it actually is generalizable into the intellectual conscience, which is something that he, right from the beginning of the book is in favor of. That that's the driving force in being this awesome uber philosopher.

1:20:37 Wes: That's actually section 122, Mark. The idea is that there's something inherently morally skeptical about Christianity and that skepticism initially is directed towards. It's directed against the virtues in general or classical paragons of virtues, the sort of Aristotelian concept of what's good. But then it becomes self immolating, it becomes all encompassing. And so it's that Christian moral skepticism that undoes Christianity. It gets turned back on itself. And so we become skeptical about Christian morals.

1:21:06 Mark: Looking back to what you were saying about his many tirades about guilt, 349, he's talking about the origin of scholars and says philosophers like the English Darwinists who see self preservation is so central that everything we do is for self preservation. He psychologically analyzes those people as well. That's because those people sort of have trouble with that. They need to stress self preservation because they are so weak and need to be bolstered in that certain way. And I, I would turn that same kind of analysis on his own preoccupation with guilt.

Remember, this whole thing is largely attempt of him to know himself. This is Socratic self analysis. But taken to an extreme far beyond where he thinks Socrates was able to take it, that you're questioning the questioning process itself. You're getting into a lot of details, you're creating problems. All the stuff we were already saying why he focuses on guilt so much is because this is something that he has trouble with. I don't know if these things, if somebody really is a psychopath that doesn't feel guilt, then this is not the appropriate message to be telling them they need shifting in the other way.

I mean, this very much makes him sound like one of those Eastern wise men that. I tell you what you need to hear that he's really trying to be a physician of the soul. And so he has to look at what problem your soul has in order to tell you which way to go. So that's part of that shaping yourself and working with what you have. And everybody having their own path. That even saying people shouldn't have guilt is not just a moral principle that you can then throw up there. I think it would be appropriate for some people to have guilt in some circumstances.

It just. It is one of the things that his society and our society is a big problem. And so it's a fine generalization to say that people should just get past this freaking guilt thing.

1:22:47 Wes: Yeah. I'm sure they're not teaching Nietzsche in prison. College programs will to power. It's easily misinterpreted by the psychopathic community.

1:23:02 Dylan: You make it sound like a voting block, Wes.

1:23:05 Wes: Exactly.

1:23:06 Mark: We should talk a little bit about the limits to self knowledge.

1:23:09 Wes: Yeah, 354.

1:23:11 Mark: Yeah, go ahead. You want to read some of that?

1:23:12 Wes: Is that what you were thinking of?

1:23:14 Mark: I was thinking of 354, but then starting even back in number 11. I mean, just generally talking about consciousness. Yeah.

1:23:22 Wes: All the consciousness passages. Yeah.

1:23:24 Mark: There's not that many of them in here. Let's maybe read. So this is section 11 on page 84, at least in my version, way earlier. Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic. And hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. Consciousness gives rise to countless errors that lead an animal or man to perish sooner than necessary, exceeding destiny, as Homer put it. If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity.

In short, of its consciousness. Rather, without the former, that is instincts, humanity would long have disappeared. Then he tells us a little more about. Before a function is fully developed and mature, it constitutes a danger for the organism and is good if during the interval it is subjected to some tyranny. This consciousness is tyrannized, not least by our pride in it. One thinks that it contains the kernel of man, what is abiding, eternal, ultimate and most original in him, him believing that they possess consciousness. Men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it, and things haven't changed much in this respect.

1:24:26 Wes: And then he talks at the very end about incorporating instinct into knowledge. And that's sort of the solution. Right. So it's consciousness divorced from instinct.

1:24:34 Mark: So I just thought it was funny. I mean, I've more or less prohibited myself from bringing up Ayn Rand in any future episodes, but given that Ayn Rand really so much of this was. She read this book seemingly. There's sections like no Altruism that sound very much like her. I think that if you were a person who is sympathetic to Rand or wanted to trace back her sources, this is the book to read. And whereas she presents consciousness. We are rational animals and consciousness is the way that we preserve ourselves. That. No, actually for Nietzsche, consciousness not only is sort of a very small part of our experience, this is.

Follows what Jung was saying a couple episodes ago as well, that, that at least self consciousness, or this is only a fraction of sort of what our mind does and how we survive. But just the fact that we've developed this crazy way to abstract ourselves from our environment, to abstract ideas from the surroundings, this is very powerful, but it's also quite dangerous and leads us to all sort of craziness, that it's paying attention to our instincts, that at least until you are very, very developed beyond what most people are today is the way that we stay alive.

So then you wanted to follow up that in 354.

1:25:46 Wes: Yeah. So there he's. He's telling a story where consciousness, which would otherwise seem superfluous. Right. Why is it even necessary? Most animals don't have it and. Or they have, I'm sorry, self consciousness. But anyway, consciousness arises for Nietzsche, as with language, out of this social need for communication, including cooperation and commanding and obeying. It's kind of, I think Kaufman does a footnote to say it's reminiscent of later Wittgenstein. Right. So the need to call for help, the need to express distress, and also the need to know one's own distress.

Right. Because language is the way we. To know our feelings is to be able to name them and talk about them. But consciousness is inadequate to self knowledge because it belongs to social rather than individual existence. Right. It's at the herd level and it engages in what he calls the genius of the species. All these herd generalities that are inadequate again to our uniqueness, our infinite individuality, I think he calls it. So he says the world of which we can become consciousness is only a surface and sign world. It's thin and stupid. All becoming consciousness involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction of superficialities and generalization.

So some of the objections to what we've called the rational and the Apollonian and ascetic side of things where.

1:27:03 Mark: Which.

1:27:04 Wes: It's the argument for bringing in the instinctual and the gay and the. It's an argument for fusing those two. So one by itself doesn't do very well.

1:27:12 Mark: Yep. And then to complete the epistemic picture regarding ourselves, may look back just a little bit to 335. How many people know how to observe something? Of the few who do, how many observe themselves? Everybody is farthest away from himself. All who try the reins know this to their chagrin. And the maxim know thyself addressed to human beings by a God is almost malicious. That the case of self observation is indeed as desperate as that is attested best of all by the manner in which almost everybody talks about the essence of moral actions. This is again making a point that we just brought up in the Bergson episode.

That our epistemic view of ourselves is inferior even to that of those around us again reinforces that there's just no unimpeachable mode of knowledge. That we are already saying that, you know, if somebody pities you, then they say they understand you, but come on, they don't really. You're on your own journey, they don't understand your suffering. Suffering. Well, this is saying you're in an even worse position in some respects to understand yourself.

1:28:07 Wes: What's the number you were reading from?

1:28:08 Mark: 335.

1:28:10 Wes: I don't know if it's 335, but there's another passage where he talks about. I think he's objecting to the idea of the Cartesian subject and he's saying we are actually least familiar with ourselves. For instance, the reason why physics is a hard science and psychology is a soft one, is because that closeness actually makes us worse off from an epistemic perspective.

1:28:30 Mark: Yes.

1:28:30 Wes: Yeah, I forget what that is.

1:28:32 Mark: Well, is that the one where he's talking about will we think ourselves to have free will? We just look at ourselves. Ah, that in itself. This being blind to. Well, come on. What is the mechanism by which your decisions actually get made? That is a great example of this willful blindness about ourselves.

1:28:49 Wes: Oh, it's actually 355. I'm not sure if it's the one with the will, but basically he's talking about knowledge. One of the functions of knowledge being to reduce strangeness, to familiarity, to reduce anxiety. And so he objects to the Cartesian treatment of consciousness as more certain. I don't think he mentions free will there.

1:29:06 Mark: That's a different one. But yeah, yeah, that's a great example also that we think that our own mind, because it's so familiar in some ways, is the most known. But due to our position with regard to our own motivations and things. Exactly. Yes. And one application of this is probably my favorite passage in this whole thing on number 334. And I actually had somebody read this at my wedding. A section of the Gay science in my 20s. I didn't stop and read it. I had a friend of mine did it, but I picked it out. Number 334. One must learn to love. This is what happens to us in music.

First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect it and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression and kind hearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing. Now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But this is what happens to us, not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end, we are always rewarded for our goodwill, our patience, fair mindedness and gentleness with what is strange. Gradually it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way, for there is no other way. Love too has to be learned.

1:30:39 Wes: That's a great passage.

1:30:41 Mark: So there. If you want to go back and listen to the Santayana episode or any of the aesthetics episode, there is the core of my whole aesthetic argument of yeah, come on, you don't just have tastes. There aren't just things that you like and you don't like. You have to understand how the mechanism works. You have to understand how you grow to appreciate things. And so I think that's a great example of how we don't know ourselves that we think that, oh, I just have taste, that's just the way I am. But that's no right. I mean, you have certain habits, but that is not the extent of your capabilities. For instance, you can see way beyond your present point of view. And that's entirely characteristic of Nietzsche's Socratic self analysis of expanding your horizons in a certain way.

1:31:21 Wes: Yeah, and it's an old argument. Some people are in a better position as aesthetic judges. Right. And it's simply a matter of the expansiveness of their experiences. So they've gotten used to classical music and they've gotten used to jazz. They pushed past the alien ness of it. And so it's not just the easy acceptance of the club music of the day. And you say, because that's what you've been exposed to and that, oh, that's my taste. And someone put on the classical music, and it's totally uninteresting to me. You can't make that judgment until you've accepted at some level classical music. Right? Until you've.

1:31:52 Mark: And you. But it's. And it's never ending. You don't just, like, now I'm an expert, right? I know all the music that's worth knowing. And so your shitty club music is of no interest to me. No, there's still something that you could expand yourself into.

1:32:04 Wes: Well, it's like, yeah, it's, you know, Stravinsky and this, you know, this sounds unpalatable and discordant to me, but for someone who's thinking in the way you're advocating Mark, that's a sign to push on and try and adjust oneself to it before making an aesthetic judgment.

1:32:20 Mark: So maybe we could connect that back up to interpreting yourself artistically, understanding yourself. You know, don't just, wow, this thing about myself really annoys me. And so I will just hate myself, basically. Like, no, come on, you got to get past that. You got to rework it or reinterpret it or somehow work with yourself so that you like yourself.

1:32:39 Wes: Yeah. He does say at one point, if you have a big forehead, you just need to grow your bangs out.

1:32:45 Mark: And that's a really.

1:32:47 Wes: Of course not.

1:32:49 Mark: I would not be freaking surprised, because I read a bunch in the first couple books that we did not assign to ourselves as we were going in, and there's so many just, like, random, weird comments about some books that he read. And that's what really makes him sound like the dickish popular guy that you're trying to like. What are you actually recommending? Come on. All you want to do is show that your taste is superior to mine. That seems like, not actually define a taste, but as dickish as that might sound when you're talking about ways to live, that becomes the challenge that there's no simple answer. There's no, oh, just be authentic to yourself. You know, just love yourself. Because then he's going to come up with Something like, nope, your intellectual conscience is not working well enough. You actually should see this thing that you're doing and despise that.

1:33:38 Dylan: That.

1:33:39 Mark: That your strategy for making yourself artistic is not working out, that there are ways to get things wrong, so there's just constant challenges on all sides of your behavior.

1:33:48 Wes: Yeah.

1:33:49 Dylan: Well, this section just after One must learn to love is called Long live Physics.

1:33:55 Wes: Yeah, right.

1:33:56 Dylan: In the end of which he says, we, however, want to become those who we are. Human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world. We must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense, while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore, long live physics. And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics, our honesty. Yeah, he's not talking about being a physicist in the sense of stodgy, old, following the rules.

1:34:37 Wes: It's an appeal to necessity, the concept of necessity again, right.

1:34:41 Mark: Or a real. Having a real respect to objectivity about the way human nature, the way you actually works, that just sort of wishful thinking is not going to accomplish anything,

1:34:51 Dylan: but also the combination of creating, but creating honestly. Right. So that it's not that you willy nilly come up with some theory and say, oh, that's the way the world works. And this is one of the most interesting parts about it to me is the way in which the judgment of truthfulness, that there's a kind of. Well, I mean, he says it right here, our honesty that we make a judgment that this is in accord with the world as honestly as we can. That's a character of our judgment that allows the world to reveal itself against what we've said about it. So it's a complicated thing, but it's not the same thing as imposing or understanding that we're imposing on the world, but lining it up with what we see as graciously and thoughtfully as we can.

1:35:35 Wes: Yeah, and again, I think this goes back to Amor Fatih in character, right? So to that end, we must become the best learners and discovers that everything that is lawful and necessary in the world become physicists. So I think the implied criticism here is against the idea of free will and simply choosing something willy nilly. The reason why we learn about necessity is because our character is governed by lawful deterministic relationships. Right? We have a certain structure and what we do comes out of that. Necessity is something we need to know about. And becoming ourselves is not simply willing in the Schopenhauerian sense.

1:36:12 Mark: I'm glad you brought that up, because that's, you know, if you're talking about metaphysical bullshit being one of the things that we're trying to avoid here. He talks about in Section 99, Schopenhauer's idea of the will as being one of those lazy metaphysical things. That is really one of the least attractive parts of Schopenhauer. And that's what people like Wagner and other Germans that he latched onto in Schopenhauer, the denial of the individual. All lions are, at bottom, only one lion. The plurality of individuals is mere appearance. Even development is mere appearance. That kind of stuff.

1:36:46 Wes: Yeah, that's the shitty club music aspect of Schopenhauer, because he talks about high culture's excesses and vices are what first attracts low culture to them. So it's the bells and whistles and it's the crap.

1:36:58 Mark: What do you make then? I think we need to talk a little bit about eternal recurrence, which is introduced in this book. It's one of Nietzsche's most famous concepts, but it only shows up in two short passages here, and I know in other works. We really wanted to give a comprehensive discussion of the way in which that affected his thinking. We'd have to talk about it throughout his works. The appearances here is what I like about it, that it's not put forward

1:37:20 Wes: as a metaphysical principle. Yeah.

1:37:22 Mark: Yes.

1:37:23 Wes: It just seems like a standard of action. Right. The kind of thing we talked about in the no country for Old Men.

1:37:27 Mark: Yeah. Okay, you're right. Actually, we have covered this in another episode.

1:37:31 Wes: So it's 285 and 341. So 285, the man of renunciation, you live with the eternal recurrence of war and peace.

1:37:39 Mark: That's what I actually was. One of the things I was referring to in his discussion of us as cyclical.

1:37:44 Wes: Yeah.

1:37:45 Mark: That there's a time for abstaining and there's a time for indulging, blah, blah, blah.

1:37:49 Wes: Yeah.

1:37:50 Mark: This is the same thing with War and Peace here.

1:37:52 Wes: Because here he advocates renunciation as something that'll lead to strength.

1:37:57 Mark: Yeah. He seems to be appraising the ascetic here.

1:38:00 Wes: But then the 341 is the more straightforward one. There's just an offhanded reference in that other class, which is basically, you know, like I said, it makes it seem like you ask yourself if what you're doing, you'd want it repeated looped ad infinitum.

1:38:13 Mark: Let's actually read the passage because it's so famous in the Greatest Weight. What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh, and everything unutterably small or great in your life. Life will have to return to you all in the same succession and sequence. Even this spider in this moonlight between the trees, even this moment and I myself, the eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again and you with it, speck of dust.

So that's the speech. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine. If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every do you desire this once more and innumerable times more would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight? Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

And I wanted to actually read that because it's just like some of the things that we attribute to Plato is like, oh, this was Plato's metaphysical theory, but he describes it like a myth. Like, that's not a theory, it's a thought experiment in some way. And that's exactly what's going on here.

1:39:31 Wes: Yeah.

1:39:32 Mark: And he's not even saying you positively should. As your existential challenge, I challenge you to embrace eternal recurrence. Like, he doesn't even know if that's actually possible, but it's an ideal. It would be really cool if you could. You would have lived a very awesome life if you could actually do that.

1:39:50 Wes: That means I'm going to see every episode of Breaking Bad an infinite number of times

1:39:56 Dylan: and sit on the toilet taking 10 minutes to do a 1 minute crap over and over and over again, forever and ever and ever.

1:40:06 Mark: You'll also go back to your child and see all those episodes of Three's Company again. So it's not all good.

1:40:11 Wes: Welcome back, Cotter.

1:40:14 Mark: Give me a break. He's the boss. Don't even think about it.

1:40:19 Wes: Wow. If our biggest regrets are the Bad TV you watched as kids. We're pretty God damn.

1:40:25 Dylan: That section is the one where there are two pieces of it that ring for me. The one is the lack of guilt, the understanding that we each are who we are right now because of everything that we have been before and all that came to us. And so there's that piece of the not being guilty there. And then there's the other piece that seems more forward projected of if there was a prescription, a kind of ethic, it would be live your life as if it were to eternally recur so that you would always be willing to own who you are at any point. Right?

1:41:05 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think the lesson of it isn't that I need to make sure that all my decisions are for the best and I need to stop taking risks and make sure that overthink everything. Suffering. And it's actually about a state of mind, mind and it's about being willing to affirm even the suffering.

1:41:21 Mark: That would be the Amor Fatih again.

1:41:22 Wes: Yeah. So it's one thing to have done something stupid and then to have that repeated infinity times, but it's another thing to have done something stupid and then spent hours full of guilt and all the excess self evaluative mental stuff that comes along with it. And then you ask yourself, doing something stupid and getting in accidents and all those things are an inevitable part of life. But the question is, is am I less likely to engage in unhelpful mental habits and states of mind if I have in mind the preciousness of life? So it doesn't have to be eternal return. It could just be, you only live once. And this is basically subtracting from my life.

1:41:57 Mark: And if you're the kind of person who just can't help feeling guilty, then you can, in the way of artistically interpreting yourself, you can gain some aesthetic distance. You can make that actually a comic characterization of yourself. So what? The lead character in that Girls show, Lena Dunham or Woody Allen. These are people who are compulsive and guilty in some way, but have then made this part of their artistic self.

1:42:24 Wes: Right. And it doesn't have to be comic, obviously. So I think, of course I see a lot of Freud in this because what Nietzsche, what he's talking about is repression here, right? The denial of instinct. So for psychoanalysis, one of the goals really, or one of the things that actually happens is that you learn to take a different stance towards your own suffering. There's sort of two layers to suffering. One is simply the suffering and then the other is Sort of a narcissistic layer. There's the actual wound and then there's the wound to one's pride, which is often even more painful.

But to the extent that you transcend that, you can look at your life from this aesthetic standpoint. And that's not just a slogan. I mean, it's really, you learn to become interested in your own life, even the shitty parts of it. And even saying, oh yeah, some of that is actually not just interesting, but beautiful. That's a redemptive part of that process. So obviously it doesn't have to be psychoanalysis. It can be any sort of reflection. But it's that second layer, reflective layer, I think, that's important here.

1:43:21 Mark: I had a Note next to 374 that I should read it.

1:43:27 Wes: So now you're obeying past Mark, past Mark laid down a law.

1:43:31 Mark: You were referring to a few passages where it's about gaining aesthetic distance from yourself. And that is one aspect of how it is possible to transcend your current self, your current point of view. And how this gets summed up in the whole. Again, like the learning to love, learning to do everything in this whole way of self analysis that he's recommending of this is what wisdom amounts to, what philosophy amounts to, if it's practiced right. So in 374 he calls it our new infinite. How far the perspective character of existence extends. Or indeed whether existence has any other character than this.

Whether existence without interpretation, without sense does not become nonsense. Whether on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation. That cannot be decided even by the most industrious, most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self examination of the intellect. Where in the course of this analysis, the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these we cannot look around our own corner. It is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be.

For example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward or alternately forward and backward. But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather, the world has become infinite for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. Once more we are seized by a great shudder. But who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world?

So he's often lauded as a perspectivist and we haven't gotten into that much in here. And there's actually. I don't even see a lot of it in here. But in this self overcoming this, what philosophy is to do, there's something like perspectivism in that. Just in that, you know, you as a part of your growth, you know, you're always in your own corner in a way, but by these tricks, aesthetically distancing yourself from yourself, being one of them, learning to laugh at yourself, taking these different modes, moving from a time of asceticism into a time of involvement and back again, then you're able to expand your horizons.

And part of the realizing that you know nothing is to realize this sort of infinity of possible viewpoints and horizons out there.

1:45:49 Wes: Right.

1:45:49 Mark: And when I say it like that, it just sounds obvious, but it seemed like this is an accomplishment, this is something you learn.

1:45:57 Wes: No, I think it's good. It's funny because I had one like I had for most of the sections. I have pretty long summaries of them, but for 374 I just, in my notes I put infinite interpretations. That's it. And I forgot exactly how much there was in there.

1:46:12 Mark: You said that the self overcoming doesn't have to be making yourself comic, but I felt like that was a pretty essential part that he emphasized a number of times. That's, well, gay.

1:46:21 Wes: Yeah. What comic is one sub species of the gay. Yeah, that has to be the light hearted, free spirited, playful. Yes, definitely. That has to be part of it.

1:46:32 Mark: Right?

1:46:32 Wes: But comic in the sense of Woody Allen. I don't think that's the whole. I mean that's one possibility. But you think it has to be comic in that full on sense I was moving toward.

1:46:41 Mark: You know, the way the book itself wraps up, unless there's something else we missed, but being able to wrap up our analysis of it in is this section 382. The great health. So health is the goal. Even if what appears as health, even if sickness is part of health. The great health being new, nameless, hard to understand we premature births of an as yet unproven future need for a new goal. Also a new means, namely a new health. Stronger, more seasoned, tougher more audacious and gayer than any previous health. Whoever has a soul that craves to have experienced a whole range of values and desiderata to date, to have sailed around all the coasts of this ideal Mediterranean.

Whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how discover and conqueror of the ideal feels. And also an artist, a saint, A legislator, a sage, a scholar, a pious man, a soothsayer, and one who stands divinely apart in the old style needs one thing above everything else. The great health that one does not merely have, but also acquires continually and must acquire, because one gives it up again and again and must give it up and then he jumps forward. You know, after we've seen all these different vistas, how could we still be satisfied with present day man?

It may be too bad, but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes. And perhaps we do not even bother to look anymore. What I got out of this, even though it only mentions it difficult to remain serious, was that that you have to laugh at yourself. You have to laugh at everything. You have to mock everything. Actually, that's in the next. The last paragraph there. The ideal is a spirit who plays naively, that is not deliberately, but from overflowing power and abundance with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine, or whom.

Those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness and temporary self oblivion. The ideal of a human superhuman well being and benevolence that will often appear in human, for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity and gesture, word, tone, eye, morality and task so far, as if it was their most incarnate and involuntary parody. And in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with him that the great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, and that the destiny of the soul changes.

The hand moves forward, the tragedy begins. That's a lot of text there, but it's worth unpacking that a little bit. Right. You have to mock in that, you have to be able to criticize, you have to be able to play with all these things that people have taken so seriously and including, I would think, all these things about yourself. And only then when you have sort of de. Deified all these things, have disrespected them in a way, can you actually think with seriousness about them.

1:49:22 Wes: Yeah, again, I was objecting to specifically comic in the sense of haha. Right. It's definitely got to be playful. And you could even say mocking and comic is definitely one possibility, but I don't think I'd exhaust it. One can be unserious and playful without taking a sort of Woody Allen approach to oneself. Right. There are many gradations of that and many other forms of being playful that fall short of that you don't have to be a comedian. In other words, saying you have to be able to laugh at yourself. Yeah, probably. I think that's right.

One more thing, though, this idea that the great seriousness really begins with that. This is a idea that goes back to Plato. The idea that seriousness and playfulness are sisters. And I think he's probably thinking about that when he writes that. So this idea that to be serious about something, to think seriously about it requires a kind of ironic detachment. In other words, it requires you to be able to give up your articles of faith or to slay your own opinions and have that level of detachment.

1:50:22 Mark: I wanted to pick on Dylan about the irreverence part of it, just because I was a representative of the Casey family and this has been an ever poignant of dispute between me and my wife, that there are some things that you really just should not disrespect, that that's not part of a mature emotional life. You need to have some things remain sacred. And here, right here is Nietzsche saying no.

1:50:43 Wes: Right. I knew you were thinking about that.

1:50:46 Dylan: I think that there is petty disrespect and there's serious disrespect. I guess what I come down to, I think that there's disrespect that's merely mean spirited and comes out of not a desire to know, but a desire belittle and demean and be cruel. That's not what I think Nietzsche means. I don't think he's a philosopher of cruelty for the sake of cruelty. It might be a philosopher of disrespect, but that's not the same thing as being a philosopher of cruelty.

1:51:16 Mark: Or I'm trying to generalize from that and expand that there is no philosophical justification for insisting on stopping during your wedding and letting out a large fart just because you're. No, I'm not. Of course not.

1:51:29 Wes: Okay.

1:51:31 Mark: That's not an example. I'm saying that would be exactly the kind of thing that would have been frowned upon in my marriage.

1:51:40 Wes: Something I would put past you. It sounds like you thought about it just now. You probably ran it by your wife. Well, it was a.

1:51:49 Mark: You know, you could write your own ceremony. It was one of those Unitarian ministers. Yeah. He gave it as an option.

1:51:55 Wes: Well, one of your brothers in law is a whoopee cushion champion, right?

1:51:59 Mark: Yes.

1:51:59 Dylan: Yep. World record holder. There's a tension yet with this in Nietzsche of disrespect. And he talks about the playfulness and he has a criticism of a kind of seriousness, but the vigor and the living dangerously and even the way in which his own intellectual development goes along speak to going all in with something, of committing fully to it it, even to the hazard, and then maybe learning from it. And so in that full commitment, it's not that you check your philosopher at the door and maybe you're regularly evaluating, but it does involve being fully in something and fully committing to that notion with great Dionysian dedication and being in that moment.

And I think that the criticism of being serious or being in that moment is a kind of seriousness and that just merely going through the activity of disrespecting that being in the moment for the sake of breaking it doesn't seem to me exactly quite right with the way he's understanding that criticism and that parody. It's not that one is merely always destructive, that you're just trying to break everything.

1:53:17 Mark: No, it's cyclical that just like you need to people to mine the old thoughts. The more conservative thinkers that mine the old thoughts that keep working at them and making bear fruit and the innovators that overturn that and think these things that are called evil thoughts in the same way that both good and evil people are needed for the survival and advancement of the species. Yeah, you need somebody to take something seriously before it can then be undone by common.

1:53:46 Dylan: Yeah, I think there's that going on. And the comedy seems to me would have to be, for lack of a better term, serious in the sense of confronting something worth criticizing. That's the way it strikes me. In his case, that is, again, it's not necessarily a virtue of just breaking the game. Right.

1:54:09 Wes: Yeah.

1:54:09 Mark: So you could think about like a long term evolution in. In the history of the Moors of marriage. And he actually talks about like he wishes more people would write moral histories of these different subsections of behavior and

1:54:23 Wes: their effect on instincts specifically.

1:54:25 Mark: Yes. So that particular instance of farting during your own wedding as a. I'm gonna break the mood right now, that doesn't make any sense. But to have a comedy of errors, you know, as a play about a wedding, and then many of those in your culture that gradually sort of get at the things that might be wrong with it, the sexism or the excessive pomp or the fact that maybe you're just doing a ceremony like this to impress your family that it's not even really serving the purpose of that it's supposed to serve, of making you feel together. Because there's all this weird financial and aesthetic stuff and tradition that's built in with, you know, those are all points that can be validly made and that then could actually serve to historically improve relationships, to make them less irrational, to make customs move forward.

1:55:14 Wes: This sounds like our Bergson episode where the comedy is socially corrective. Right? And I've been a defender of even the most extreme forms of comedy. And because the basic idea is that you can't limit comic expression simply because you suspect that someone might actually hold the objectionable views that they're parroting. Because at some level they do, and we all do. And that's the point of the parody, to check them. But in the same way that you can't. If you applied that principle universally, then you couldn't criticize anything because you'd have to mention the thing that you were criticizing.

That's a silly idea. I think comedy has to be given free rein. I think, although Dylan's point is taken sometimes it's not actually comic. It's masquerading as comedy, and it's actually just cruelty. But I think, you know, again, I still think that gay and cheerful are wider or broader concepts in the comic. Although I think the comic is an important part of that.

1:56:08 Dylan: Well, like, for instance, there would be a distinction I would make between staging a fart in the middle of your wedding versus being up there just before you say, I do. And all of a sudden you pass gas and everyone has this kind of creeping smell of this noxious fumes coming over them after this loud, wet fart. And that might actually be really, really funny in exactly the way in which the burden of living and just the reality of living comes in on our most serious moments. And that I think. I think there's a real difference between those two things, between staging a fart and actually having it just happen.

1:56:49 Wes: I think we have to observe the harm principle here. Right? If you're actually forcing noxious molecules up someone's nose, you've gone beyond comic expression.

1:56:59 Mark: I would just like to register that one of the most serious historical objections brought against this, the whole Leopold and Loeb thing, and that we have dealt with this fart issue. We've given equal time to the Leopold and Loeb issue and the fart issue. I think that shows that we're in the right direction.

1:57:16 Wes: By the way, I wanted to mention just one thing about danger, because you guys have mentioned. I've talked about that a few times, often. He's not necessarily thinking about physical danger, I think, although that's one possibility, but also simply the danger of subjecting oneself to having one's cherished beliefs overturned or challenged. So this kind of does relate to the comedy thing. So if you look at 283, he talks about carrying warlike heroism into his search for knowledge. There are lots of of places where he talks about this introduction of the heroic and the warlike but into search for knowledge.

And that's often the case. He's not simply praising heroic and warlike values outright. It's often in the context of someone who's actually a contemplative type. Someone who you think of as the opposite of warlike, as staid and passive and inactive. But the idea is that these heroic values can actually be part of the contemplative life. And so you're. And ultimately he talks about danger there and being happier and more productive because you are willing to live dangerously and live at war with peers and with yourselves, which I take to be a war of values.

And then the other place is 324 where he says, for me, it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings too find places to dance and play. Life is a means to knowledge. With this principle in one's heart, one can live not only boldly, but even gaily and laugh gaily too.

1:58:47 Dylan: Yeah, I think it's a good way to end it.

1:58:49 Wes: All right.

1:58:50 Mark: All right. Any other closing typey thoughts? I guess I should just point out that this was. It was really good to revisit this. I really considered this during undergrad to be my favorite book by, on balance, my favorite philosopher.

1:59:04 Wes: Yeah.

1:59:04 Mark: That I read more of Nietzsche's books on my own. They were just more fun to read. I got more individual insights out of them them than most of the other stuff. They weren't boring for the most part. It can be a little tedious. He goes on and on about the same. What is German? You know, that just things that were current questions for him that aren't for us anymore. Just ways of thinking about things. But yeah, no, it was great to go back and sort of get a little more unity that more of a sense of the flow of the whole book. I don't know if I'd read more than just individual chunks in individual classes before, but how the various books relate to each other, what the themes are that recur, what the overall point of this book as an entity was.

And so I really appreciate. I think this is the central thing to read if you want to get into Nietzsche, that it's in a way less gimmicky. It's not like Zarathustra. That's this Weird fake biblical thing. And it's not. We were kind of dissatisfied coming out of the genealogy of morals discussion because he doesn't even really reveal, like, what his ethics is, what you're supposed to do. It's just this one story about the history of the development of moralities worked out in a good amount of detail. But I really think this gives you a wider view of his thought.

And even though I'm not an uncritical fan of his brief style, that I. I think I would have liked him to go in more detail. And I really like that he went back and added book five, which there's a reason he didn't just write it as a different book. It really just develops and states more clearly, often the same exact things he was talking about earlier. I also appreciated the one. One of the aphorisms that we didn't talk about that talks about profundity versus pseudo profundity, that, you know, if you really are profound, then you want to be clear.

2:00:58 Wes: Those who are profound strive for clarity, I think.

2:01:01 Mark: Yes, yes. So that really shows you the difference between him and perhaps a lot of the philosophical tradition that was influenced by him.

2:01:11 Wes: Yeah. So, yeah. I have one more thing in closing, which is one of the things we touched on was the idea of people being radically individual and their health and their values being specific to them. And I think that's actually an idea that ought to be taken very seriously. And I think it's another connection to psychoanalysis. And so some of our episodes we did on psychoanalysis, part of the upshot of that was that you're reflecting in a particular way to discover your own particular system of meanings and associations. So almost as if every human being was like their own country with their own sets of set of mores and customs.

And often that is kind of the way it is. So to understand what's good for you, it's not a matter of discovering what's universally good for all human beings. It's actually an interpretive process. In the same way that you would interpret a work of literature. You find out what your symbols are, what they mean, how they're influencing your behavior as. And you're engaging in that same playful, ironically distant process. Because often it's the condemnation, Right. In the same way that Nietzsche decries the repression of the instinctual, it's the fear and anxiety leading to repression and condemnation that blind us to those aspects of ourselves.

So often, again, this goes towards becoming oneself. Often that process of becoming oneself isn't about laying out new laws for oneself. It's simply observational. And then things begin to happen. Being contemplative actually leads to change.

2:02:57 Dylan: That's my closing One of my favorite ones is actually 324 in Media Vita, which means in midlife he says, no, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious. Every year here, ever since the day when the Great Liberator came to me, the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery and knowledge itself, let it be something else for others, for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion or a form of leisure. For me, it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings too, find places to dance and play.

Life as a means to knowledge. With this principle in one's heart, one can live not only boldly, but even gaily, and laugh gaily too, and who knows how to laugh anyway, and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory. So that's my favorite one.

2:03:57 Wes: Amen.

2:03:58 Mark: Nice. Next time we'll read portions of John Rawls A Theory of justice, Originally published in 1971. We are supported by your donations. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since our last time have included and actually this is a long list and I think part of that is because did you know that our not school, our citizen site has been around for a whole year?

2:04:22 Dylan: Wow.

2:04:23 Mark: Yeah. So some of the original people that gave us the $50 for the yearly membership, it's being renewed now. So a few of these people are people that a year ago were listed as giving $50 and now they have given another because that's what PayPal made them do. That means they're too lazy to cancel their membership and forgot they had it or they actually are finding it worthwhile. And I should also point out that there are many other $5 a month members that we never read on here because they're only giving $5 a month. But God damn it, those add up, don't they?

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2:07:10 Dylan: Good night.

2:07:11 Wes: Good night.

2:07:14 Mark: Some people like to tell me how to drink my coffee. Some. Some people like to think they know

2:07:21 Wes: how I should dress Some people like

2:07:24 Mark: to eat that their chorizo for breakfast Most don't think that they know what's best this morning I opened my hospital door and the air rushed in it I started to stir and to think and ignore what the rest of the world has bequesting

2:07:50 Wes: time.

2:07:51 Mark: When a man hears a calling There comes a moment when a man's got to act There comes a certain time when a man has a man Drake charging up from COVID now my confidence back. I'm not gonna care what other people think.

2:08:10 Wes: Drink.

2:08:11 Mark: I'm not gonna drink what other folks drink if somebody tells me what I don't like I'm gonna tell them to take a hike. I'm going out wearing my grease and sun I'm going out and I'm not gonna shower I'm going out gonna eat raw potatoes I'm going out to unleash my power. I'm not gonna care what other people think I'm not gonna drink what other folks drink if somebody tells me what I don't like I'm gonna tell them to take a. Sam.